#hori's deeply disturbing world building

[justatalkingface]

I saw your answer for the ua sending kids to danger, especially war, and I raise you a different possibility (100% speculation on my part) "can we say for sure the others schools were asked the same thing but said no?"

Yes. We dont know anything about the others schools. Maybe they offer and Hori never show as we saw them entering in the war part 2: the eletrical bangaloo....but to be fair, it would be hard for them to sit in class and doing homework as war is literally in their grounds, streets and so forth.

But on part 1. We dont see the others students there. So again, my especulation, what if they had put feets down and said no?

But Nezu said yes? I can think of a few reasons for that. (Keep in mind I dont think Nezu is a smart as Hori and the fandom wants us to think)

1) could have been a power play of sort. "Only mys students can handle this" which well...could work as Nezu is not human and doesnt seem to care about the students on a whole (remmeber Mina and Kami vs Nezu? How fair was that?)

2) he genuinely thought his students would be an asset to the heroes and said ok. Which makes me believe even more he doesnt care for his students's safety.

3) he was forced. Ok, what could have made him agree to this? Blackmail comes to mind but what secret is si damn important you are willing to send kids to war?

Those are my top 3 reasons. And not sure if is canon this but I think the class A1 didnt know they were sent to a war...if this is true, then is anothet adult(non human) who failed Izu.

Like MHA is an accidental dystopia.

The thing is with Nezu is the age old standard of Int/Wis; Nezu is book smart, he has a lot of knowledge, facts, and ability to apply those facts to make a thing happen. That's Intelligence, the ability to use your mind, and he's probably only has even faint in his sheer Int score with Dr. Diabolus Ex Machina.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is when you go, 'But should I do this'?

At a memetically extreme example, a High Int, Low Wis character could find a door somewhere, decide to open it, and make a siege engine out of, I don't know, hamburgers and coat hangers to bust it open. This is certainly a thing they could do, and it'd work because they are, in fact, that spot.

Meanwhile, the character with higher (any) Wisdom would walk up to the door... and then try to open it like a normal person.

Intelligence is ability to use your mind, and Wisdom is what tells you how you should use your mind, and when you look at Nezu, you only really see Intelligence, and then no one in story ever seems to question his decisions, really, because he's really smart, but there's a real question if he uses his intelligence well? Because there are a lot of 'I can do this, but no one, including me, ever asked if I should do this' kinds of choices in UA, and if we're not just blaming it on bad writing, all of that comes down to Nezu, in the end. The literal cities they just... have? The robots that probably have killed people? The Sports Festival? All of those are thing with very questionable elements that UA does anyways, seemingly because they can and no one's ever stopped them from doing it.

That's looking at the question from the angle of 'Nezu, while well meaning, made a bad call'. There is, however, one other major option, and it starts with this: why does Nezu run a school? On a fundamental level, I'm not sure Nezu's goal in running UA is for the students, so much as he views the students as a step towards his goal.

Unironically, he's a sadist who enjoys low-key torturing human beings because of past trauma, which... before anything else, begs a question: is it just low-key torture he likes? Or is he just practical enough to realize than anything more would be more trouble than it's worth?

But, beyond that problem, let's look at his position: he's the head of UA, the biggest, bestest school for Heroes, which is a job that comes with a lot of publicity/power, which, inevitably, rolls back to him. His job allows him massive amounts of control over the development of the cutting edge of heroism, who by dint of their fame and success influence other heroes, all of which collectively influences Japanese society as a whole by a pretty significant degree.

Meanwhile, Nezu is: brilliant, deeply traumatized, likes torturing, and through that defacto controlling, humans. He's also not a human, and takes pains at times to point out that others are humans and he's not, while also having assumably inhuman instincts and priorities; almost certainly he has some level of anti-human bias.

There's... there's an obvious correlation here. Fundamentally, Nezu is a character who seems to be made to be complicated, imperfect, with dark depths to him. The way he's written, Hori clearly doesn't want him to be, but, well, he writes a lot of deeply flawed characters we're supposed to find no wrong with.

If you look at Nezu that way, where he views students more as an asset, or an investment, than as, well, students, or as people, then your point takes on a different light. Looking at it with cold logic, the students can contribute to the various conflicts; even if they die, for the greater good of society (which he lives in and benifits from), heroism as a career (which he is in a position to benefit from greatly, as well as influenced greatly), and quite frankly as a living being on Japan/Earth, that cost is more than worth the price if they help support the status quo; its not like there's not going to be more next year, right?

And that's the thing that really interests me; what the hell was Hori thinking when he made Nezu? With Bakugou and Endeavour, for example, you can see where they started off one way, and went another? Nezu though? His entire point as a character seems to be firmly as the 'nice but somewhat manipulative' principal, but it's a waste of his fundamental characteristics. Did he have a different role in the prototype? Because if I was writing Nezu as a character, here's what I'd write him as:

An enemy. Not evil, not a villain, but a obstacle for Izuku to surpass in UA; it's not that he's bigoted, like Aizawa is (or at least to the same extent), he just well and truly doesn't care about people and what they do as long as his bottom line is met. And Izuku isn't there to be a new hero, like Bakugou, about fame and wealth, he doesn't fit. Worse yet, if we're working off of the original, 'Quirkless Hero' framework? Fundamentally, he is a threat to the concept of heroes that is established, that makes people want to think outside the box, and the thing is? Nezu likes the box. He's one of the people who designed it; he'd like everyone to stay in the box, please and thank you.

There's this epic story we're never going to get of Izuku being a little revolutionary, fighting against the heroic establishment to change heroism for the better and for the rights of the Quirkless, and his first major enemies are: Bakugou, the bully, Aizawa, the biased teacher who enables Bakugou and attacks Izuku, and Nezu, who enables all of them, and barely gives a shit about Izuku at all but would absolutely murder him in a heartbeat if he thought he could get away with it, but is resigned to fact he can't just kill people because they mildly irk him.

To your last point, though, fundamentally MHA is exactly a dystopia, by design; it's dystopian nature is one of the main causes for almost all conflicts in the story, from the villains, to the heroes, to Izuku's core personality traits, but for some reason Hori got really scared to admit that so he covered all the bars and locks with confetti... only after he got all the ways he purposefully made it a dystopia looking all harmless and fun, he missed all the ways he accidently made it a dystopia. To this day, I'm still not sure if he designed the heroic pay system, what little of it we know, to be purposefully that fucked up, or he just did some basic work to support what happens in the story and missed how deeply disturbing those implications were.

#ask #bnha critical #mha critical #nezu's kind of super interesting if you stop to think about him #incredibly sus #but interesting #its an injustice he's not an amoral authority figure Izuku's supposed to rebel against #hori's deeply disturbing world building #and hori's accidentally deeply disturbing world building